Penelopes Experiences in Scotland | Page 6

country, or up that way. She was very extravagant, and
had something to do with Jingling Geordie in The Fortunes of Nigel. It
is marvellous how one's history comes back to one!"
"Quite marvellous," said Salemina dryly; "or at least the state in which
it comes back is marvellous. I am not a stickler for dates, as you know,
but if you could only contrive to fix a few periods in your minds, girls,

just in a general way, you would not be so shamefully befogged. Your
Anne of Denmark, Francesca, was the wife of James VI. of Scotland,
who was James I. of England, and she died a hundred years before the
Anne I mean,--the last of the Stuarts, you know. My Anne came after
William and Mary, and before the Georges."
"Which William and Mary?"
"What Georges?"
But this was too much even for Salemina's equanimity, and she retired
behind her book in dignified displeasure, while Francesca and I meekly
looked up the Annes in a genealogical table, and tried to decide
whether `b.1665' meant born or beheaded.
Chapter II.
Edina, Scotia's Darling Seat.

The weather that greeted us on our unheralded arrival in Scotland was
of the precise sort offered by Edinburgh to her unfortunate queen,
when,
`After a youth by woes o'ercast, After a thousand sorrows past, The
lovely Mary once again Set foot upon her native plain.'
John Knox records of those memorable days: `The very face of heaven
did manifestlie speak what comfort was brought to this country with
hir--to wit, sorrow, dolour, darkness and all impiety--for in the
memorie of man never was seen a more dolorous face of the heavens
than was seen at her arryvall . . . the myst was so thick that skairse
micht onie man espy another; and the sun was not seyn to shyne two
days befoir nor two days after.'
We could not see Edina's famous palaces and towers because of the
haar, that damp, chilling, drizzling, dripping fog or mist which the east
wind summons from the sea; but we knew that they were there,

shrouded in the heart of that opaque, mysterious greyness, and that
before many hours our eyes would feast upon their beauty.
Perhaps it was the weather, but I could think of nothing but poor Queen
Mary! She had drifted into my imagination with the haar, so that I
could fancy her homesick gaze across the water as she murmured,
`Adieu, ma chere France! Je ne vous verray jamais plus!'- -could fancy
her saying as in Allan Cunningham's verse:-
`The sun rises bright in France, And fair sets he; But he hath tint the
blithe blink he had In my ain countree.'
And then I recalled Mary's first good-night in Edinburgh: that `serenade
of 500 rascals with vile fiddles and rebecks'; that singing, `in bad
accord,' of Protestant psalms by the wet crowd beneath the palace
windows, while the fires on Arthur's Seat shot flickering gleams of
welcome through the dreary fog. What a lullaby for poor Mary, half
Frenchwoman and all Papist!
It is but just to remember the `indefatigable and undissuadable' John
Knox's statement, `the melody lyked her weill, and she willed the same
to be continewed some nightis after.' For my part, however, I distrust
John Knox's musical feeling, and incline sympathetically to the Sieur
de Brantome's account, with its `vile fiddles' and `discordant psalms,'
although his judgment was doubtless a good deal depressed by what he
called the si grand brouillard that so dampened the spirits of Mary's
French retinue.
Ah well, I was obliged to remember, in order to be reasonably happy
myself, that Mary had a gay heart, after all; that she was but nineteen;
that, though already a widow, she did not mourn her young husband as
one who could not be comforted; and that she must soon have been
furnished with merrier music than the psalms, for another of the sour
comments of the time is, `Our Queen weareth the dule [weeds], but she
can dance daily, dule and all!'
These were my thoughts as we drove through invisible streets in the
Edinburgh haar, turned into what proved next day to be a Crescent, and

drew up to an invisible house with a visible number 22 gleaming over a
door which gaslight transformed into a probability. We alighted, and
though we could scarcely see the driver's outstretched hand, he was
quite able to discern a half-crown, and demanded three shillings.
The noise of our cab had brought Mrs. M'Collop to the door,--good (or
at least pretty good) Mrs. M'Collop, to whose apartments we had been
commended by English friends who had never occupied them.
Dreary as it was without, all was comfortable within-doors, and a
cheery (one-and-sixpenny) fire crackled in the grate. Our private
drawing-room